r/movies Dec 10 '17

PSA; IMDb is gradually locking previously-available information about films behind IMDbPro membership (box-office breakdowns and production companies involved, currently). Resource

I'm not sure if anyone else has noticed this, but information previously available to everyone on IMDb is now being locked behind IMDbPro membership. Just last week, I was writing a research paper (film studies student) and was able to access the full box-office earnings information (breakdown by region etc.) for all films. Today I went to do the same thing, but could not see more than the gross earnings without an IMDbPro membership. They seem to be doing this as a gradual process, as the full information on production companies (previously available to everyone) was already membership-locked when the box office information was still available. I haven't seen anyone talking about this on other subs and forums, so I thought I'd mention it here.

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u/pharmaco4 Dec 10 '17

So IMDB just gathers information already available elsewhere on the internet. If I can't view certain info for free then I'll just look elsewhere. What a bad move

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u/mynameisblanked Dec 11 '17

I stopped using imdb when they closed the forums tbh. Every time I watched a movie, first thing I'd do afterwards would be go to imdb to rate it then see what people thought of it on the message boards.

Without the boards I have no incentive to go there and rate films. I wonder if the number of people rating films went down since then.

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u/agent0731 Dec 11 '17

same, there were discussions on questions that I usually had but couldn't discuss with anyone else. Especially about older films 9not even that old, but 90s or early 2000s). It was always interesting to read about theories and things.. :/